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From a sandy shoreline to a modern masterpiece, Louvre Abu Dhabi has come a long way.

Having opened to the public yesterday, UAE residents and visitors can see for themselves the treasures which lay inside the vast project on Saadiyat Island.

To get to this point it has taken thousands of hours of man power and some of the most advanced available construction techniques.

And now a stunning new time-lapse video by EarthCam shows the eight-year journey which has seen the museum become an iconic landmark.

More than one million high resolution images, including billion pixel panoramas, were captured by EarthCam’s camera systems designed to withstand the environmental challenges unique to the Middle East.

Its team installed 10 megapixelcam time-lapse cameras strategically throughout the project site, archiving progress from more than 50 different perspectives before reviewing more than 70,000 hours of archive footage.

Construction on the site started with the excavation of 503,000 cubic metres of sand, and 250 cubic metres of water was pumped out of the excavations each hour, every hour, for six years.

The Rain of Light dome features 7,850 geometric steel and aluminium stars, and it weighs 7,000 tonnes.